Britain's intervention in Greece during the second world war is a shameful episode in British history. We would do well to remember it.

Dunkirk. The Battle of Britain. The Blitz. The Battle of El-Alamein. D-Day. Arnhem. V-E Day. V-J Day. The 70th anniversaries of these well known second world war engagements have been commemorated extensively over the last few years, with official events and widespread media coverage. However, one British engagement in the second world war did not receive any national recognition. In fact, it has effectively been scrubbed from the nation’s collective memory.

Though it garnered a huge amount of press coverage at the time, British actions in Greece during and immediately after the war have disappeared down the memory hole. The reason for this is that the events fatally undermine some of our most sacred national myths: the so-called ‘just war’ of 1939-45, the “Greatest Briton” Winston Churchill, and the much celebrated post-war Labour government under Clement Attlee.

The Greek drama also punctures the myth of Churchill as a great leader and a ‘Great Briton’, and highlights the pro-imperial tendencies of Labour Party heroes Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevan, who were intimately involved in the destruction of popular leftist forces in Greece, first under Churchill’s leadership and then during Attlee’s 1945 government.